David Biello reports that global warming has become a 1-degree Celsius reality, making progress at climate talks in Paris even more imperative. The Earth climate has changed. After nearly two centuries of fossil fuel-burning, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have reached 400 parts per million, especially boosted by the seemingly ever-accelerating amount of combustion in the last few decades according to the World Meteorological Organization.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 0.04% may not seem like much but it is enough to have already raised average global temperatures by a full degree Celsius, according to the U.K. Met Office, with more warming on the way as the greenhouse gas lingers invisibly in the atmosphere, trapping heat, or mixing into the ocean, rendering its waters more acidic. In fact, the world has not seen CO2 concentrations this high in at least hundreds of thousands of years. Roughly 35 billion metric tons of CO2 are spewed into the atmosphere annually and rising.
The waters of the global ocean have become 30% more acidic in the last few decades and the world has not been this warm in thousands of years. This year is likely to be the hottest one since record keeping began, thanks to an El Nino weather pattern that is forming up on top of global warming. The top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1998, which was the year of the last major El Nino.
Biello suggests that the Earth has entered what might be called the Anthropocene thermal maximum, an era of global warming driven by one species penchant for burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. Right now in 2015 may be the last time anyone breathes air with average CO2 concentrations below 400 ppm, as this number marches seemingly upward. But Biello says we do not have to keep adding to that number forever.
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